Rachel is an oboist, composer and teacher. As an oboist she has worked for 20 years performing and recording music with orchestras and ensembles in the UK and abroad. She currently plays with John Eliot Gardiner’s English Baroque Soloists and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, and in award-winning ensembles La Serenissima and Boxwood and Brass. Rachel was born and raised in the U.K. She graduated from Cambridge University with a starred first class degree in music and subsequently studied oboe on a postgraduate scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London. After a year at the Hochschule für Musik in Leipzig she returned to London to complete a doctorate on the instrumental music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and afterwards held a teaching post at the Royal Academy of Music. Rachel's compositions initially grew out of a relationship with the community at St Paul's church in Hammersmith, where she co-founded a community choir with her husband Sam Chaplin, and regularly wrote and arranged music for services and concerts. Now based in Hertford, her music draws on sacred stories and incorporates settings of her own poetry. Her debut album Music from an Inner Space was released in February 2024. Rachel is a visiting teacher at Trinity Laban College of Music and teaches oboe at St Albans High School for Girls.